Yesterday (August 11th) marked the one year anniversary since the passing of Robin Williams, who was a beloved, charismatic and exciting comedian, actor and personality. Uniqueness is overused within today’s generic saturation of celebrity; Robin Williams was without a doubt unique and creative. His career spanned the silverscreen which included animation to thrillers and everything in between; the diverse acting ability can even be linked within tech, think voiceovers in animated films such as Robots, Aladdin, Flubber and CGI adventures in Night Of The Museum franchise.
A critical aspect of Robin Williams personality was his movement; he could display a wired comic before stepping it down several notches for a moving scene. Below is a video which displays this and comes courtesy of a Vimeo channel video, it begins with a clip from Good Morning Vietnam; I loved this performance because it felt spontaneous, dangerous and exciting.
A comparison of movement is illustrated 1:34 minutes into this video with a clip of One Hour Photo which is below. As you can see, there are two different scenes which are side by side, these could easily contain the same movements, but Robin Williams subtly changes to convey the effect of variation. A person in real life for example walks to work, but they do not walk with the same movements each day, this also conveys the impression of two different days, not the same structured scene which has been repeated.
A clip from Flubber now which is below and illustrates the way Robin Williams acted, I can’t think of many comedians who would be able to successfully convey a story while acting with a CGI non entity, the performance is natural and embodies the character while still managing to project authenticity, it’s also not forced over the top acting for the sake of it, he understands the skills required.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJT2QOpnYb8
I was going to place comedy from Robin Williams below, but, I cannot guarantee the clips won’t contain swearing, therefore I have not, also, there are clips on Youtube from a US show by the name of Shrink Rap, by all means take a look, it’s fascinating. The clip is 46 minutes long and again, I have not uploaded it because of the reason above.
1 year on and the world still misses a genius.
